I didn’t like Camus

I didn’t like Camus,

too alien and strange

for a 17-year-old mind

but decades later I see

his point: we are strange.

Heinlein went one better:

strangers in a strange land

trying to grok through life.

I walk slowly through

a contemporary art museum,

knowing my mind stopped

at the modern, the modern

still makes sense,

still tells a story while

the contemporary makes

no pretense of making sense,

denies there is a story,

it just is and nothing more.

Strange is familiar and

no one knows the definition

of grokking any more.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVersePoets. To see more poems submitted, please visit the site. The links will be live at 2 p.n. Central time today.

Photograph by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.